Tuesday, November 30, 2010

National Public Radio's pro-Israeli bias in downplaying a Nov. 29, 2010 terror bombing against Iranians and presenting Israeli agent Jeffrey Goldberg as an objective observer of Iranian and Arab affairs, is exposed by former Associated Press reporter Michael Hoffman.

Hoffman analyzes statements by Robert Siegel, Peter Kenyon and Mr. Goldberg, as heard on the "All Things Considered" broadcast of Nov. 29. Here is documentary confirmation of NPR's disinformation, betrayal of the public trust and complicity in the Zionist propaganda system.

The case of Lithuanian historian Petras Stankeras is a textbook example of the Talmudic inquisition at work

Petras Stankeras

by Michael Hoffman • www.RevisionistHistory.org

Efraim Zuroff’s tirade against Lithuanian “Holocaust denial" (see below) is a textbook example of the Talmudic inquisition at work. I say “Talmudic” because the notion of a supreme level of cosmic suffering and horror far above that of any non-Judaic nation is a thoroughly Talmudic prerogative of the Master Race of Holy People. Lithuanian historian Petras Stankeras can’t question the kangaroo Nuremberg Trials because such questions offend the Master Race of Holy People. Mr. Stankeras can’t question the magical Six Million figure because such questions offend the Master Race of Holy People, and for the same reason he must not state the fact that there is no document from Hitler ordering extermination.

“Blatant Holocaust denial” is a loopy pseudo-legal term cooked up by Deborah Lipstadt and then universally imposed on the language of the world by the poor persecuted ones. This is heresy-hunting, not law or history.

Notice how Mr. Zuroff feels free to accuse the entire nation of Lithuania (“Lithuanian society”) of deep-seated dishonesty and guilt for horrible crimes. But don’t anyone dare say such things about Israeli society! By the Talmudic standard, Judaics are the judges of the gentiles; gentiles are never fit to judge Judaics. Negative generalization about Israelis is a step on the road to another victimizing ‘Holocaust,” while negative generalization about “Lithuanian society” is a righteous corrective against a nation of “Holocaust” criminals.

This is the Talmudic double-standard that Lithuania must swallow if they want to be a "member in good standing of the European Union and Nato.” This is the reverse racism that historian Petras Stankeras must embrace if he wants to restore his career and gain back his position in the Ministry of the Interior.

The most heinous offense of all on the part of the Lithuanians is to dare to even think for a moment that what their nation suffered under Soviet Communism, including at the hands of Christian-hating Soviet Judaics, was in any way equivalent to what the Mater Race of Holy People experienced under the Nazis. How dare any gentile for even a moment compare his or her family’s suffering to that of the Holy People! Outrageous!

Efraim Zuroff:

"Lithuania has been the leader of a insidious campaign to try to distort the history of the Holocaust by seeking recognition that Communist crimes were just as terrible as those of the Nazis. This false equivalence would unjustly rob the Shoah of its universally-accepted uniqueness and historical significance, turning the worst case of genocide in human history into merely one of many tragedies.”

According to the Talmud, in all things, Judaics are higher, more noble, more suffering, more persecuted than non-Judaics. There can be no equality (“equivalence”) between the two, most especially in the realm of war crimes and genocide upon which Judaics have a proprietary (and lucrative) trademark.

Not to worry, however. Hannah Rosenthal, the U.S. government’s "special ambassador to combat antisemitism” has arranged for a massive “Holocaust" education indoctrination “seminar" for Lithuanian teachers, who will be taught to know their place as inferiors and dutifully conform to the Talmudic hierarchy of victimhood.

***

US must take a tougher line on Baltic revisionism

Why has the US remained silent while European nations roundly condemn Holocaust denial by a Lithuanian government official?

The resignation late last week of historian Petras Stankeras from his post as a "senior specialist" at the Lithuanian ministry of the interior received little attention in the US, but the scandal that prompted his decision to give up his job should set off a red warning light in Washington, and especially in the state department and the US embassy in Vilnius.

The story began two weeks ago with the publication in the 8 November issue of the popular news weekly Veidas of an article by Stankeras to mark the 65th anniversary of the opening of the Nuremberg Trials in which he described the proceedings as a "clearly wrong judicial investigation", and openly and unequivocally denied the Holocaust.According to the now former government official, one of the major failings of the Nuremberg trials was that they "provided a legal basis for the legend about 6 million supposedly murdered Jews, although the court did not have a single document signed by Hitler on the extermination of Jews (no one has found this document to this day, if it even exists, although a million-dollar prize has been promised).”

While such a blatant assertion of Holocaust denial has never been the norm in Lithuania, a member in good standing of the European Union and Nato, anyone closely following the policies of the government on Holocaust-related issues over the years could not have failed to discern a deep-seated reluctance to honestly confront its Holocaust past and especially the extensive collaboration of local Nazi collaborators in the mass murder of Jews, primarily inside Lithuania, but outside its borders as well. From an abysmal failure to punish any of the Lithuanians who participated in the annihilation of Jews to a clear tendency in history books and textbooks to hide or minimise local complicity in Holocaust crimes, to a total failure on the issue of restitution, Lithuanian society has not even begun to tell the truth about its Holocaust history and truthfully deal with its implications.

Worse, Lithuania has been the leader of a insidious campaign to try to distort the history of the Holocaust by seeking recognition that Communist crimes were just as terrible as those of the Nazis. This false equivalence would unjustly rob the Shoah of its universally-accepted uniqueness and historical significance, turning the worst case of genocide in human history into merely one of many tragedies.

All this has been going on with increasing intensity in recent years, virtually unopposed and unchallenged, neither within the European Union nor in Nato, but Stankeras' article has now proved the catalyst for action in Europe. In a letter signed by the ambassadors to Lithuania of six EU members – Britain, Estonia, France, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden and Norway – there is not only an unequivocal and strong condemnation of the Holocaust denial and the lack of any public or official Lithuanian protest, but for the first time, there is an open denunciation of Lithuanian efforts to create a false equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes. The letter condemns the recent decision of a court in Klaipeda to allow the use of swastikas "as a traditional Lithuanian symbol", and goes on to denounce "Spurious attempts … to equate the uniquely evil genocide of the Jews with Soviet crimes against Lithuania, which, though great in magnitude, cannot be regarded as equivalent either in their intention or their result."

...this week, the US embassy in Vilnius is conducting a special Holocaust education seminar for Lithuanian teachers, financed by a grant announced by Rosenthal (Hannah Rosenthal, the US "special ambassador to combat antisemitism” -Ed.) during her visit to Lithuania this past spring....

(Emphasis supplied)

Comment from a reader:

Why on earth would anyone imply that crimes committed towards Jews by the Nazis is somehow worse than crimes committed towards other ethnic groups by the communists? Do you have any idea of the type of tactics they used? Everything ranging from execution to torture to starvation! And they killed by far many times more people than the Nazis ever did. Furthermore, they did attempt to wipe out complete ethnic groups. What about the Ukrainians in the Holodomor? Six million starved Ukrainian men, women, and children. No big deal to the person (Zuroff) who wrote this piece though right?

TEHRAN — Unidentified assailants riding motorcycles launched separate bomb attacks here on Monday against two of the country’s top nuclear scientists, killing one and prompting accusations that the United States and Israel were again trying to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

...The motorcycle attackers attached the bombs to the professors’ cars and then drove off, detonating them from a distance, according to Iranian media reports. Mr. Abbasi’s wife was also hurt in the blast, the reports said. Last January, a remote-controlled bomb killed a physics professor, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, outside his home....

The slain scientist, Majid Shahriari, managed a “major project” for the country’s Atomic Energy Organization, Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, told the semiofficial IRNA news agency. His injured colleague, Fereydoon Abbasi, is believed to be even more important; he is on the United Nations Security Council’s sanctions list for ties to the Iranian nuclear effort...

Israel and the United States have often signaled that they will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. Neither has acknowledged pursuing sabotage or assassinations there, but both are widely believed to be pursuing ways to undermine the country’s nuclear program...

“They’re bad people, and the work they do is exactly what you need to design a bomb,” said a (U.S.) federal official who assesses scientific intelligence and spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re both top scientists.”

P. J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, did not address the Iranian accusations in detail. “All I can say is we decry acts of terrorism wherever they occur and beyond that, we do not have any information on what happened,” he said.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Editor’s note: Someday, probably far in the future, there will be a public revelation in the corporate media that "Al Qaeda” is a false flag operation, created, shepherded, and managed at the top, by certain western intelligence agencies.

*****

Al-Qaeda’s Christian Massacre: Aiding and Abetting the Occupation of Palestine

If we are to believe the voice on those Osama bin Laden tapes, the elusive al-Qaeda leader cares deeply about Palestine. Yet the actions of the terrorist network he supposedly still directs all too often belie its statements of concern for their “brothers” under Israeli occupation.

The massacre of Iraqi Christians at Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad also makes one wonder about claims that the group has “a great sense of timing.” The slaughter of Catholic Mass-goers occurred just one week after church leaders from across the Middle East had forcefully condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

More than 200 members of 14 different churches had gathered in Rome for a papal synod to address concerns about Christian emigration from the region. However, as one commentator observed, “Time and again, they turned the discussions … towards the Palestinian question.”

In their final communiqué, the bishops urged the international community to apply UN Security Council resolutions and take “the necessary legal steps to put an end to the occupation of the different Arab territories.” Significantly, they charged the Israeli occupation with causing tensions that have led to the exodus of Christians from the Middle East.

In a follow-up news conference, the archbishop in charge of the committee that drafted the communiqué, Cyrille Salim Bustros, rejected any biblical justification for the Zionist project. “The concept of the promised land cannot be used as a base for the justification of the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians,” he said. “Sacred scripture should not be used to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestine.”

Not surprisingly, Tel Aviv was none too pleased with this serious challenge to the legitimacy of the self-described Jewish state. The following day, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon issued a statement condemning the bishops. The synod, he said, had been “hijacked by an anti-Israel majority,” turning it into “a forum for political attacks on Israel in the best history of Arab propaganda.” In particular, his government was “appalled” by Archbishop Bustros’ “outrageous comments,” describing them as “a libel against the Jewish people and the State of Israel.”

One week later, the Anti-Defamation League sought to enlist Pope Benedict XVI to Israel’s side. Expressing condolences over the Baghdad killings, ADL leaders asked the pope to “join together to eliminate all terrorism in the name of religion” and “to use the Church’s moral authority to prevent Israel from being made a pariah by its enemies.”

But with the Israeli occupation under such censure from Rome, it was a rather odd time for avowed supporters of the Palestinian cause to slaughter Catholics in the Middle East. Indeed, many Iraqi Muslims harbour “suspicions” about the shadowy al-Qaeda front’s targeting of “essentially non-players” in the country’s post-invasion sectarian strife.

Indeed, if anyone benefited from the church massacre it was Israel. Reminiscent of the Zionist underground’s attacks on Iraqi Jews in the 1950s, this assault on the Christian minority was clearly designed to encourage them to flee the country where they had lived in relative peace and prosperity for two millennia.

The removal of a Christian presence from the Muslim-dominated region would eliminate the model of coexistence as a viable alternative to the “clash of civilizations” view of the world. “By focusing attention on a direct and eternal conflict between the West and Islam,” M. Shahid Alam argues in his new book, the clash thesis aims “to acquit Israel of serving as the chief source and conduit of this conflict.”

Moreover, the massacre lent plausibility to the Israeli narrative on why Christians are leaving the Middle East. In a 2006 report by the hawkishly pro-Israel Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, titled “The Christian Exodus from the Middle East,” senior fellows Jonathan Adelman and Agota Kuperman concluded: “The single greatest cause of this emigration is radical Islam.”

Ironically, it was a representative from Baghdad at the synod who had suggested a way to encourage Middle East emigrants to return to Palestine. Armenian Archbishop Emmanuel Dabbaghian proposed that every bishop should make an annual visit to the Holy Land. “The influx of pilgrims to the Holy Land,” he said, “would convince the inhabitants who have emigrated to return to their homeland.” Given the apprehension about “the Arab demographic threat,” such a development would be viewed with trepidation in Tel Aviv.

“Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent,” Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, wrote in a 2009 article in Commentary magazine. “Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state.” Still, it’s an improvement on the “at least 80 percent Jews” that David Ben-Gurion said would be necessary for “a viable and stable state” on the eve of the premeditated ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

In contrast to al-Qaeda’s efforts to drive a wedge between Islam and Christianity, the solidarity between the world’s two largest religions in Palestine poses a real threat to the Israeli occupation.
Sabeel, an ecumenical grassroots liberation theology movement among Palestinian Christians, in its “Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism,” affirms “that Palestinians are one people, both Muslim and Christian” and rejects “all attempts to subvert and fragment their unity.”

Couldn’t the Baghdad church massacre also be seen as an attempt to “subvert and fragment” Palestinian unity? With “brothers” like al-Qaeda, who needs enemies?

Thursday, November 18, 2010

...American officials in Afghanistan used to call Col. Abdul Razzik a "malignant actor" who must be sidelined. Now they hail the suspected drug lord as a hero of the new Kandahar offensive and a leader with national potential.

Col. Razzik—an illiterate 34-year-old Afghan Border Police officer who calls himself General, wears flashy Swiss watches and controls southern Afghanistan's lucrative border crossing with Pakistan—emerged over the past two months as the coalition's top choice for clearing Taliban strongholds in Kandahar province, the campaign's centerpiece and the insurgents' heartland.

His reversal of fortune reflects a departure from U.S. counterinsurgency efforts to better governance, marginalize crime-tainted power brokers and win civilians' trust. Since U.S. Gen. David Petraeus took command of coalition forces in July, the military has focused more on killing as many Taliban as possible with the help of whatever local allies can be found, including strongmen whose abuses had made the Taliban popular in the first place...

Col. Razzik, who says he has been working on some operations with the CIA but denies receiving the agency's money, is...a central actor in the crime-tainted political network that maintains a stranglehold over southern Afghanistan, allegedly rigging elections, collecting protection money and smuggling drugs...

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Hoffman analyzes the propaganda system’s presentation of the religion of Holcaustianity as objective history, in terms of its function as the expression of the Talmudic mentality, and the dual standards which this mentality imposes on the genocide debate, with certain prerogatives and immunities reserved solely for a privileged few, denominated by Hoffman as the "Master Race of Holy People." Hoffman's point of departure is a Zionist protest over the appearance of Dr. Norman Finkelstein at Rutgers University in November, 2010.

A national frenzy has seized America. Fierce debate and name-calling has raged about job losses, the nation’s growing $12 trillion debt, mandatory health care, socialism – and even witchcraft. Sarah Palin, the patron saint of low IQ Americans, has hovered over this sordid contest like an evil Halloween wraith.

If we believe polls, the Democrats look like toast. President Barack Obama may be ready to join the ranks of the unemployed.

What did Democrats think would happen when they eagerly took over the monumental financial and military mess created by George W. Bush and the Republicans? No wonder Republicans are gleefully rubbing their hands. But now they may be next to get stuck with Bush’s Tar Baby.

Amidst all the low-brow invective, Tom Brokaw, the respected former national news host for NBC News, recently wrote a fine opinion column, “The Wars That America Forgot About.”

He (Brokaw) quite rightly asked why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been ignored during the election race. After nine years of combat, 5,000 US dead and 35,000 seriously wounded soldiers, and expenditure of over $1 trillion – silence.

These longest and second most expensive wars in US history have dropped off the radar. Not even the latest WikiLeaks shocker, which revealed the US condoning death squads, torture and mass human rights violations in Iraq, became a campaign issue.

No one raised the scandalous fact that US-run Afghanistan and Washington’s political satraps there produce and export 94% of the world’s heroin. Russian drug authorities just claimed that Afghan heroin kills 10,000 Russians annually.

The Iraq and Afghan wars are ignored, Brokaw rightly says, because Americans are totally focused on high unemployment and economic insecurity. America’s wars have become irrelevant.

The US professional military represents less than 1% of the population, mostly working-class people from small towns in America’s rural, poorly-educated heartland. It’s not like Vietnam War days, when millions of Americans were drafted to serve in the war, creating huge public protests that eventually ended the war. The US has adopted Imperial Britain’s model of small, all-volunteer armies fighting in remote colonial wars to supposedly bring the light of Christianity and justice to benighted natives.

However, it now costs $1 million per annum to keep each of the 120,000 US troops in Afghanistan. The US has also deployed over 40,000 armed mercenaries in that nation.

Americans have become psychologically detached from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, even as the specter of stalemate or even defeat in both conflicts looms. Brokaw calls on Americans to re-engage and give their wars and politicians the public attention they urgently need. Waging stealth wars is undemocratic and unwise.

During World War II, America’s “Home Front” was engaged in the conflict by war taxes, rationing, buying war bonds, collecting clothing and metal, and accepting shortages of consumer products.

By contrast, President George W. Bush actually cut income taxes in wartime, the only time in US history this has happened. In an act of profound financial deception, instead of funding the Afghan and Iraq Wars through higher taxes, the Bush White House and subservient Congress financed the wars by “Emergency Supplement Requests,” which were supposed to be only used short-term for natural disasters and the like. Bush’s view appears to have been, “après moi, le deluge.” He raised the national debt to vertiginous levels, vastly expanded the size of government, increased military spending by 50%, on top of cutting taxes.

The first wave of the deluge came in 2007-2008, as a financial cataclysm hit America. More is on the way as the US stumbles from one financial crisis to another - the latest being bankrupt states and pension funds.

The real $1 trillion plus costs of the wars were quietly added to the $12 trillion national debt, America’s credit card. Funds to finance these huge war loans was borrowed from China and Japan, putting America ever deeper in thrall to the Asian powers, and undermining its finances. The Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress continued Bush’s dishonest method of war finance, hiding costs from the public.

America’s wars should be fully funded through direct taxes. History shows great powers cannot long go on waging imperial wars on credit. Look at Spain, Holland, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Which empire do we think will be next?

A special war tax ought to be levied on all Americans to fully cover the mounting costs of Afghanistan and Iraq. We must pay for our wars and world hegemony.

It will be interesting to see how all the flag-waving Republican “patriots” will react when asked to pay for the wars they so passionately support from the safety of their sofas, and at no apparent cost. Make Americans actually pay for Afghanistan and Iraq and these wars would be ended in short order.

But if Republicans likely retake Congress, it is most unlikely a war tax – or any major new taxes –will be implemented. Republicans have gone from being the party of balanced budgets and pay as you go to a northern version of Argentina’s wild spending Peronista Party. Right-wing Republicans will press for more war, in more places – financed, of course, by the magic of credit. Few stop to think that this manic borrowing it wrecking America.

(Emphasis supplied)

Low IQ Americans and Our Republican Future

by Michael Hoffman

The war tax is with us, but it is hidden. It appears in the form of under-funded schools and colleges, much less money for infrastructure, roads, bridges, hospitals, parks, rail and mass transit; attacks on Social Security and Medicare. Bush’s wars have drained the quality of life out of America and led to the near-collapse of the usurious banking system.

The low-IQ crowd will back Republicans stripping the American people of quality schools, high speed rail and health care while they increase spending on wars to make the world safe for Israeli terror and dispossession.

It’s expensive to take on 800 million people; supposedly we sort out the good Muslims (neutral on Israeli genocide) from the evil fanatics (“holocaust-denying” devils). The equation still leaves several hundred million “bad” people we supposedly have to fight. Low-IQers can’t seem to fathom that such a fight will continue to be exorbitantly costly and make a mockery of all talk of fiscal responsibility from Republicans, who will skin poor and working class Americans to serve their racist, Talmudic Israeli masters.

Here in Coeur d’Alene almost the entire state government of Idaho met this past weekend under the auspices of the US Chamber of Commerce —Communist China’s agent in bankrupting working class America while making super-rich traitors even wealthier. The meeting was a self-congratulatory "states rights” and “patriot” extravaganza on the part of the “conservative Republicans” who rule Idaho.

You have to have a very low IQ indeed to imagine that the Republican party of War Zionism and mass export of US jobs to Asia is going to “balance the budget” or bring us peace and prosperity.

Monday, November 08, 2010

In this approximately 15-minute talk, Michael Hoffman analyzes the thoughtless acceptance of the Newspeak "Holocaust denial" phrase as a universal description of dissenters who dare to question Allied and Zionist dogma. He points to the hypocrisy of approved "holocaust denial " by Zionist professors who deny the 1945 Allied holocaust in Dresden, Germany or the Israeli genocide in Gaza — "denials" which are not a subject of academic controversy or media reproach and do not threaten the university employment or credentials of the deniers.

In the course of this talk, Hoffman confronts Prof. Cary Nelson's arguments in the Nov. 7, 2010 issue of "The Chronicle of Higher Education," about the "Holocaust" and "Holocaust denial" as it applies to the case of Prof. Kaukab Siddique of Pennsylvania's Lincoln University.

Hoffman is the author of "The Great Holocaust Trial: The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West's Most Sacred Relic” (forthcoming from Independent History and Research, December, 2010). He is a pioneer in the study of the psychology and epistemology of Newspeak as applied to public perception of World War II historiography.

Hoffman’s work is made possible by the sale of his books, newsletters and lectures and by donations from truth-seekers. He is an independent scholar and has no corporate or institutional affiliation or sponsorship.

Sunday, November 07, 2010

A new book on Adolf Hitler has been published (he seems to have as many would-be biographers as Abe Lincoln). It is titled “Hitler’s First War” by Thomas Weber and it is not the typical lurid screed. It’s actually impressive, in certain respects. It concerns both the reality of Hitler’s World War I military service and how that service was distorted by propaganda later. The author and his publisher (Oxford University) enjoy sneering at Hitler’s own account of his actions during World War I (in "Mein Kampf" and elsewhere) as “self-mythologizing.”

Hitler is of course easy to attack and critique. It takes no courage to go after Der Fuhrer anymore than it does to assail Muslims. Both are perennial and popular targets in American media and politics. Consequently, the sneer at Hitler for "self-mythologizing," while perhaps accurate in many respects, is not particularly impressive.

I doubt that either Thomas Weber or Ann Farmer, a reporter for the New York Times, would ever ascribe that epithet to a saintly “Holocaust survivor.” Even if the charge were true, it would take considerable audacity to make it in public and risk one’s career.

Like many World War II revisionists, this writer collects "Holocaust Survivor" Tall Tales. I have a thick file of fairy tales and tales of miracles and relics invented by the these media-canonized saints, including one about the Seven Dwarves of Auschwitz! I have another in which “Trudy, the Wonder Child of the Camps” was made to clean the entire kitchen floor of Auschwitz with her tongue! The false witness these characters spew about the Germans knows no limit — and they can always find a gullible New York Times scribe to report their tales to the world without the least tinge of skepticism.

The most devastating observation on the credibility of these yarn-spinners was made by a Judaic sociologist sixty years ago: "...most of the memoirs and reports [of 'Holocaust survivors'] are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilettante philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks...”

Just for fun, I wish to share with you the latest entry in my file. It’s about a famous and wealthy Judaic tailor now working in Brooklyn, who makes suits for presidents and movie stars, and whose life was saved in Auschwitz by the fact that he regularly wore an SS officer’s shirt around the camp!

The Magic Shirt

“He looked like a somebody"

A Meticulous Tailor, Called Upon by Designers and Politicians Alike

by Ann Farmer | New York Times | Nov. 6, 2010 [p. A18]

...for more than 60 years, Martin Greenfield has been an influential face of men's fashion in New York City...Mr. Greenfield, 82, is still old-school in his devotion to the labor-intensive, exacting and vanishing art of making tailored garments by hand...(He works) on the second floor of the factory in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he and his two sons oversee 117 workers...

Mr. Greenfield first grasped the importance of appearances while trying to survive the Holocaust. When he was 14, he and his father, mother, two sisters and a brother were taken from their home in Pavlova, in what was then Czechoslovakia, and later delivered to Auschwitz.

He was assigned to wash clothes in the camp's alteration shop, and one day he accidentally ripped an SS officer's shirt, an affront for which he was beaten. The officer threw the shirt at Mr. Greenfield, who mended it and started wearing it instead of the uniforms the other prisoners wore. From then on, he said, the guards and prisoners began treating him with respect.

"He looked like a somebody," said Jay Greenfield, 52, Mr. Greenfield's oldest son and the executive vice president of the company, Martin Greenfield Clothiers, explaining that his father attributes his survival to that shirt.